Windows crashes and blue screen have become without a doubt the stuff of popular culture, with Microsoft's operating system being derided, criticized and mocked for its luxuriant variety of issues, independent of the actual version of the platform.

Raymond Chen, a developer on the Windows Shell team at Microsoft has made public some internal data from 2007 containing the statistics extracted out of all Windows Explorer error reports. According to Microsoft, the number one killer of Windows explorer is malware.

"The XYZ virus (not its real name) and its variants together are responsible for the top six categories of Explorer crashes, and by an enormous margin," Chen stated. "Seventh place, an actual bug, comes in at only 1/80th the rate of number six; if you group all the XYZ virus failures together, then the combined virus failures outnumber the most popular Explorer bug by a factor of nearly 600."

Chen failed to explain what the "units" reference in the graphic represents. However, what is clear is the fact that a single piece of malicious code, along with two additional versions were responsible for causing 600 times more crashes than a bug in Windows Explorer. This is one case where Microsoft is not responsible for the user experience delivered by its operating system although some may argue that poor security is what led to the infections generating Windows Explorer crashes in the first place. However, the Redmond company is simply too easy a target, along with the Windows client, and the general tendency is to blame both for problems that are not directly connected with the quality of the operating system or with Microsoft.

"I remember reading a report that half of Explorer crashes can be directly attributable to malware. Seeing the top Explorer crash swamped by a single virus really drives that point home. The anti-malware team is very interested in this data, because when a new category of Windows crashes suddenly spikes in popularity, there's a decent chance that a new virus is on the loose," Chen added.